Don’t enable HTTPS login on the ASUS RT-N66U (& how to fix it if you have)

If the title of this post means anything to you, then odds are you already know where to find the setting below:

Trust me on this one

Yeah, I know you probably think it’s a good idea to enable HTTPS login on your router so rogue clients on your LAN can’t steal your login info. In reality, the odds of that happening are pretty small, and I daresay a compromised client is more likely to attack other clients on the LAN – which are probably set to allow access from other local clients – than it is to attack your router. But I digress.

I’m not sure if what follows is due to how most browsers handle HTTPS certificates or a bug on ASUS’ part, but enabling HTTPS can easily lead to this on your next login attempt:

Yep, that’s your router locking YOU out of the house

Among the joys of the above message:

The web page never refreshes

The client this message appears on isn’t disconnected from the router (thankfully)

I’m not sure how one would “use the updated IP address and port number” as the RT-N66U doesn’t tell you what those are at any point during the process

Anyway, if you do happen to find yourself in the above predicament, you can fix it by switching to a different browser on any machine on your LAN and accessing the URL the error message is at. This should log you in to the router. Then switch back to HTTP and all will be right with the world again.

71 thoughts on “Don’t enable HTTPS login on the ASUS RT-N66U (& how to fix it if you have)”

I switched it to https on an RT-n65U. I was able to re-access the router via https://192.168.1.1:8443 I was able to do everything as before but I could not set it back to http as you’ve indicated. I finally restore factory defaults to get my http access back.

In your Firefox preferences, in the security tab, at the bottom, there are the offline data. Find your router address and delete it. Reconnect to your router. You may have an invalid certificate warning, add the exception and you should be able to connect. Procedure differt on another browser, but I was blocked in both firefox and safari.

It appears that the certificate installed in the router is not accepted. Fortunately I had safari installed (never use it but now came in handy) which automagically accepts certs it can’t check the identity of(most browsers reject it by default). This allowed me to navigate to https://192.168.1.1:8433

i don’t know about you, but if you do a lot of “remote administration” outside of your LAN, wouldn’t you want https? although you won’t have a site certificate, it’s still better than plain text via http through the WAN.

the default https port on the ASUS RT-N66U Router is 8443 but you can change this to whatever you want. i believe there’s even a built-in domain name so you can access your router by typing in

Thank you for this comment! I had enabled HTTPS but couldn’t connect to the router with ipaddress:8443. I was almost ready to factory reset it thinking http was messed up. Based on your comment, I went to https://router.asus.com:8443 and got right in.
Wonder why it doesn’t work by ip? Anyway, thanks for your helpful post.

none of those work for the rt-ac68r. If you log in with router.asus.com you get this message:

Settings have been updated. Web page will now refresh.
Changes have been made to the IP address or port number. You will now be disconnected from RT-AC68R.
To access the settings of RT-AC68R, reconnect to the wireless network and use the updated IP address and port number.

So basically I have no idea what to do short of reset to factory specs. I am so bummed out about this, having just put my buffalo n router to a shady retirement. It never gave me any problems, but it didn’t have 5g which so far is useless anyway.

Well, I can tell you this, from experience when working for a large mainframe company, the pressure to release products–either for competition or to stay on schedules promised to customers- who bought based on those promises, it seems a lot of the 802/11ac stuff is not ready, is full of bugs, is unstable, and basically, hit and miss. If its not the router its the adapter cards, the 7260 in the laptop or the others –all with driver issues. Its pathetic. I am going to send it back and either stick with n for now or go with cisco small business stuff. Its a little more money but it works and its something that can be serviced vs “try loading new firmware”. “try doing a factory reset and reloading”, all of which require hours of setting up printers again and wireless devices through the house. NOT IMPRESSED ASUS. Not impressed.

Well a lot of 802.11ac stuff isn’t certified (yet) to begin with, even though the spec’s been finalized. I’m still on .11n on this end for that reason, and also because I tend to use routers until they break.

I get the dreaded “Settings updated” error after about 5 minutes of being logged in to my NT65U, once it happens I can’t get in on any browser from any machine.
The only thing I’ve found so far is to power cycle the router which is less than ideal given that I only get 5 more minutes.
None of the above seems to help and, for me, https is already turned off.

I had the same problem on my N65U after upgrading the firmware to version 3.0.0.4.376.1665. I solved it by downgrading to version 3.0.0.4.374.4422 (both firmware versions was downloaded from the Asus website).

I have been reading some of the forums on this issue, and it seems like I need to download a different firmware. I can’t access my asus config page no matter what I type in. Also I can’t download the proper firmware because I can no longer access the internet ( I’ve reset everything possible and I’m using an Ethernet connection)

I am having the same issue. None of the suggested URLs will load either, even on 2 separate PCs. Not even on my phone using Safari! Guess I am going to have to reset my router to factory. Quite annoying!

It’s nice to see when I search “asus router ssh can’t login” on google your post shows up at the top of the list. I’ll still keep ssh enabled as I have reasons to use that level of security and will just login via the ssh port/link as posted in the comments — thanks for posting!

Isn’t it funny that since those “old” models, this strange behavior is still present on RT-AC87U?
Yes, this is my router and yes “To access the settings of RT-AC87U, reconnect to the wireless network and use the updated IP address and port number.” is my message.
That message was on Firefox. No other approach was useful, by name or by IP.
Started IE, used IP and I’m in.
After that, I’ve deleted all that I’ve found in Firefox options, related to certificates from the router.
Result: was able to enter by IP.
I’m still looking after a solution to use the name.

actually, you’ll notice in firefox, if you look in options -> advanced -> network tab, the asus router is storing offline data which is “intercepting” your requests for access from the router. You can clear the offline data, refresh the webpage and it should give no problems.

“in firefox, if you look in options -> advanced -> network tab, the asus router is storing offline data which is “intercepting” your requests for access from the router. You can clear the offline data, refresh the webpage and it should give no problems.”

This works for me in firefox, too, for an ac66u. I had this problem several times. Maybe after firmware updates.

After accessing the router via https://router.asus.com:8443/ I was unable to restore access via IP by just switching the authentication back to HTTP but after I went to the LAN IP tab under the LAN section and hit Apply without changing anything it magically worked again.

Fun fact: it’s your cr*ppy Firefox (and I’d bet Chrome does it too, but firefox is getting really low in terms of quality, like only unintelligent decisions were accepted there – no surprise – a big business-in-the-first-place corporation trying to pose as open source underground)!

Serious browsers don’t do it (Opera Presto, IE). Flawed design of the above browsers and the state of the art web design based solely on bad practices forced me to move to Firefox (using Chrome as a backup for even worse web design) and Opera for this simple stuff.

One step forward, three backward. At least we have javascript for animated “parallax” effect and tracking how many of our friends clicked a certain crippled site. On the other hand just a mere gazillion of workarounds can get us to normal simple web browsing. And we of course get router web-configs as a mobile “apps”. How uncool is that!

Funny is that the search function of the FF address bar does not work on misspelled websites, however FF changes the manually entered IP “intelligently”. It’s not that easy to restart the misbehaving router in the café you are at anymore. You must ask the not really helpful bartender to perform the tedious task of flipping the switch on and off for you…or still fire up your less foxy trusted browser for this task.

Part of a fail on ASUS’ side is that 192.168.1.1 might not be complete without “/Main_Login.asp”. No index.htm(.php) for you mush!
router.asus.com is also funny – needless, but quite a workaround for the aforementioned browser behavior, but makes your nonstandard IP settings useless, as anyone can enter “router.asus.com” without having to know if it’s 192.168.1.1 or 192.140.0.100. ah the good old days!

I use Firefox and have the https login problem on my RT-N66W. Frikkin annoying!!

The easiest workaround i use is to change to “Private Mode” in Firefox and then i can access router with https://192.168.1.1:8443 because then you get the option to make an exeption of the faulty security cerificate.

Thank you for that tip.
I don’t use Firefox, but found a similar solution in Google Chrome (I have a localized version, and apologize if the english words below are not quite right).
1. Click on the icon to the left in the address line showing e.g. https://192.168.1.1:8443
2. In Exceptions: Pop-up-windows: Select ‘Always enable on this website’
3. Refresh the page
4. Ignore the warning and click the “advanced” link
5. Now enter the login page of the asus router.

Thank you Thank you Thank you! That solve the problem. Now I can access AICloud, use the Router app remotely no issues. I have just about given up after configuring so many ports forwarding rules through my modem and router wondering why the heck it was not working. The ASUS app try to force you to use http – so just cancel out of it when it asks.

With havin so much content do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or
copyright infringement? My website has a lot of exclusive content I’ve either created myself or outsourced but
it seems a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my permission. Do you
know any techniques to help protect against content from
being stolen? I’d genuinely appreciate it.

There’s nothing you can do to prevent that except hope Google & Bing rank your content higher because it’s original. AFAIK Google already has measures in place that mostly mitigate the problem and it hasn’t been a huge deal for me.

Thank you very much.
I was can’t disable this ******* https on my router. When I try to disable it, router redirect me to logout page and is no changes was save on router.asus.com:8443.
But when i go in asusnetwork.net:8443 I was disable https.

Merlin WRT not solve the problem, if https is enable I can’t log in via https from wifi device. But still I can log in via LAN. You can set BOTH in settings then you can log in by http from wifi or WAN. Maybe there is problem with certificate because few months ago all worked great.

I just want to thank you. You saved me I was decided to make hard reset of the router. https://router.asus.com:8443 work great and I’m keeping https login enabled because I access router over the internet.

I was able to fix this in Firefox by going to “Tools –> Options –> Privacy –> Click ‘clear your recent history’ –> select Time range to Clear: Everything, Cache checkbox, and Offline WebSite Data checkbox”. After clearing, I enabled both https and http access in my router just to be safe for the future.

Like everyone else here is saying, Thanks! You saved my butt! 🙂 Didn’t think to remember the port number displayed in the setup. Once I had that info I was able to log back in. Asus RT-N16 here. Thanks again!